Steampunk Sheep

This is a project that I did for my older daughter, who loves steampunk and, since she's a weaver and a knitter, loves sheep. It was her Christmas present a year ago and when I finished it I forgot to take pictures before I wrapped it up to mail off.

Well, she was doing some rearranging in her house and remembered that I needed an "after shot", so she sent me one. I adorned it with gears, old alarm clock bells, a Scottish cloak clasp,a number plaque, and rusty wire. No everyone's cup of tea - but the two of us were quite pleased with the outcome!

Life is Just a Bowl of ... Tickets!

My daughter gave me a roll of tickets for Christmas to use in my art.  When I removed the plastic wrapping I absentmindedly began pushing the cardboard ring at the bottom in and out and the circle of tickets began expanding.

I'd seen these ticket bowls before but never realized that it was this easy to do.  I just kept pushing in one direction and pulling the top up evenly and voila! a bowl made out of tickets.  Now I want to get several different colours and make more.  If I'd tried to follow directions for this? - it never would have happened.  Talk about happy accidents!

Suitcase Saturday - Travel Score

After a year of showing you the art supplies and ephemera I keep in all my vintage suitcases I thought it would be fun to show you the myriad wonderful things I've brought home in my suitcases from my many travels here and abroad.

So on Suitcase Saturdays I'll tell a tiny bit about a trip and show a travel "score."  Let's start in Paris!

Le Bon Marche

This trip was late June of 2002 with my daughter Jenny and my best friend Susan.  We got to spend 12 days there - magnifique!  We stayed in a little hotel on the Rue du Bac a few blocks away from Le Bon Marche, one of the original department stores in Paris and  Diners en Ville a lovely  shop featuring kitchen and dining ware.

We made more than one trip to each of these. Pictured  are just three of the stylish items I picked up. There are two of these scallop plates from Diners en Ville, a steal at 75 francs (the shop still had old prices on many things which resulted in a lot of calculations - thank goodness Jenny's a wiz speaking French!)

The glass and vase were both on the clearance table at Bon Marche and to this day are still among my favourite things.

Journal Fun!

 More shots of journal pages done over the recent holidays.

 A mix of vintage ephemera, tags,

 stamps, and wrapping paper.

I love the juxtaposition of the glittery contemporary tags

with the 100 year old ledger entries.  

Word of the Year

Several years ago Margot and I quit coming up with New Year's resolutions and instead we each pick a word for the year. Past years have found me working on energy, trust, re-frame, let-it-go, harmony, breathe and listen.  Some years I'm able to practice the word better than others, but I always find myself conscience of the word as I go about my daily life.

This year's word is patience.  Patience with myself, with others, with situations and with things I cannot control or change.  A dear friend, who knows I picked this word for the coming year, sent me this quote from Rumi -
Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be far-sighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be so shortsighted as to not be able to see the outcome. The lovers of God never run out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full.

Happy New Year.

Life on the Coast

Last weekend harbour stroll of the year here in Morro Bay.

From the Bookshelf

If you've read my blog for awhile you know that each new year I choose a book that I read a bit of every morning on the first day of the weekend. I try to find one that can be easily broken up into 52 parts - by chapter, number of pages, etc.  This one looks like there will be a couple of "things" each week.  So obviously since I haven't read the book yet, I can't give you my review so here's what Amazon has to say about it -

What is the first thing to learn in art school? "Art can be anything." The second thing? "Learn to draw." With 101 Things to Learn in Art School, artist and teacher Kit White delivers and develops such lessons, striking an instructive balance between technical advice and sage concepts. These 101 maxims, meditations, and demonstrations offer both a toolkit of ideas for the art student and a set of guiding principles for the artist. Complementing each of the 101 succinct texts is an equally expressive drawing by the artist, often based on a historical or contemporary work of art, offering a visual correlative to the written thought. "Art can be anything" is illustrated by a drawing of Duchamp's famous urinal; a description of chiaroscuro art is illuminated by an image "after Caravaggio"; a lesson on time and media is accompanied by a view of a Jenny Holzer projection; advice about surviving a critique gains resonance from Piero della Francesca's arrow-pierced Saint Sebastian. 101 Things to Learn in Art School offers advice about the issues artists confront across all artistic media, but this is no simple handbook to making art. It is a guide to understanding art as a description of the world we live in, and it is a guide to using art as a medium for thought. And so this book belongs on the reading list of art students, art teachers, and artists, but it also belongs in the library of everyone who cares about art as a way of understanding life.

By  the end of the year I hope to have a better understanding of what I missed by majoring in music instead of going to art school.

Boxing Day

In my younger days, this was always the day we took a long walk through the woods, came home to eat Prime Rib, Yorkshire Pudding and Sherry Trifle, and pulled our Christmas crackers. The riddles were read aloud and puzzled over, the tiny toys played with and best of all, the funny paper crowns to wear while the Stilton and Port made the rounds. This very English tradition was started to help a young friend, recently come from the British Isles, who was homesick and finding an American Christmas missing a few important bits and bobs. She was 13 at the time and celebrated every Boxing Day with us for the next 20 years. Happy Boxing Day, Michelle!

Happy Christmas to All

A Jolly Old Elf 11x14"

"And I heard him exclaim as he drove out of sight
"Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night!'"

The best of the season to all of you from Altered by the Sea!

Pickwick's Christmas (for Bronwyn and Jenny)

 Today is the 22nd day of December.  For my daughters and I that always meant Pickwick's Christmas.
Sometime during the '70's I stumbled across the recording below that included a reading of a Christmas chapter from Dickens's Pickwick Papers.  It begins thus "As brisk as bees, if not altogether as light as fairies, did the four Pickwickians assemble on the morning of the twenty-second day of December..."  It soon became a regular part of my holiday traditions. By the time the girls were born and old enough to listen I had transferred it to cassette tape and each year, on the 22nd of December, we would listen to it in the car as we drove to go shopping or on errands. Charles Laughton does an excellent reading of the tale and after not too many years  the girls could quote most of it from memory.

From this album and then to the cassette tape and this morning on the way to work I'll listene to it on my mp3 player plugged into my car's stereo system.  Times may change, but some traditions are forever golden.  Happy Holidays, especially to the two best daughters in the whole world.  Love, Mom